es delay, and therefore is worse than the evil for a fleet advancing
to the attack of forts, where the object must be to close as rapidly as
possible. There are, however, on board such vessels a few guns, mounted
forward and called chase guns, which, from the rounding of the bows,
bear sooner than the others upon the enemy toward whom they are moving.
To support these and concentrate from the earliest moment as effective a
fire as possible upon the works, Farragut brought his ironclads inside
of the wooden vessels, and abreast the four leaders of that column. The
heavy guns of the monitors could fire all around the horizon, from right
ahead to right astern; and the disposition had the additional great
advantage that, in the critical passage inside the torpedo buoys, these
all-important vessels would be on the safer side, the wooden ships
interposing between them and the sunken dangers, which threatened an
injury far more instantaneous and vital than any to be feared from the
enemy's shot and shell.

The position of the ironclads being determined by these considerations,
the arrangement of the wooden ships for the attack conformed to the
admiral's principle, that the greatest security was to be found in
concentrating upon the enemy the heaviest fire attainable from his own
guns. As at Port Hudson, a large proportion of the fourteen vessels he
purposed to take in with him were of the gunboat class, or a little
above it. Resort was accordingly again had to the double column adopted
there; the seven ships that had the most powerful batteries forming the
right column to engage Fort Morgan. The lighter ones were distributed in
the other column, and lashed each to one of the heavier ships, in an
order probably designed, though it is not expressly so stated, to make
the combined steam power of the several pairs as nearly equal as
possible. Among the gunboats there were three that had side-wheel
engines, the machinery of which is necessarily more above water, and so
more exposed than that of a screw--a condition which, although their
batteries were powerful for their tonnage, emphasized the necessity of
sheltering them behind other ships during the furious few minutes of
passing under the guns of the fort.

The sum of these various considerations thus resulted in the fleet
advancing into action in a column of pairs, in which the heaviest ships
led in the fighting column. To this the admiral was probably induced by
the reflectio